Interactive Installation Wins International Competition for Venice Biennale

The team’s winning pavilion design, Syntony, offers a transdisciplinary solution to this year’s competition theme – ‘How will we live together?’ The installation consists of a series of transdisciplinary laboratories, each with spatial perception experiments in motion, light and sound, which can be interactively explored by visitors. The team are part of the school’s Interactive Architecture Lab, a multi-disciplinary research group. 

Watch a prototype video of Syntony in action:

Vimeo Widget Placeholderhttps://vimeo.com/389897384

Syntony’s labs have automated sensing systems that collect occupant data and interactively control waveforms throughout the space; one lab includes a kinetic interactive installation, allowing visitors to manifest multiple simultaneous perceptual illusions of waves travelling through the room.

Alongside their research within the Interactive Architecture Lab, Dr Vasilija Abramović, Dr Ruairi Glynn and Parker Heyl teach on the school’s boundary-breaking Master’s, Design for Performance & Interaction MArch at UCL at Here East. 

• Syntony will be exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale between 29 August – 29 November 2020.

More information

Dr Ruairi Glynn
Ruairi Glynn is the Programme Director for Design for Performance and Interaction MArch, a practicing installation artist and Associate Professor. He has exhibited internationally with recent shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and the Tate Modern in London.

Dr Vasilija Abramović
Vasilija Abramović is an architect, teaching fellow and researcher at The Bartlett School of Architecture. Her work has been published in conferences and journals, most recently at ACADIA 2018, and eCAADe 2017.

Parker Heyl 
Parker Heyl is a mechanical engineer, roboticist and teaching fellow at The Bartlett. Previously he has worked in the MIT Media Lab as a Scratch Junior and Harvard’s iLab developing soft robotic grippers.

Image: Syntony, isometric drawing, by Vasilija Abramović, Ruairi Glynn and Parker Heyl, 2020.